20 hours of insights in 20 minutes
In this podcast summary, Will MacAskill talks about longtermism and his recent book, “What We Owe the Future”. The original podcast is 2 hours 54 minutes. The estimated reading time for this summary (excluding “My Thoughts”) is 42 minutes.
Summarising a podcast is a new one for me, and my decision to attempt this was a bit experimental. The original podcast […]
A Mind for Numbers is about learning how to learn. Oakley doesn’t just give study tips (though it certainly does include many). She also explains why those study tips or strategies work, and supports that with evidence.
Spoonley discusses the demographic challenges facing New Zealand over the next few decades. The book tackles an interesting and neglected topic and its overall message (i.e. that there need to be informed, national discussions about this) seems sensible enough. Unfortunately, however, Spoonley’s writing isn’t great, and he relies too heavily on secondary sources.
The premise of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone sucked me in. Unless you’re a therapist, you’ll never know what goes on in the therapy room. Even if you’ve been to therapy, you might wonder what other patients talk about in therapy, and what therapists really think of their patients. The premise piqued my curiosity, and Gottlieb delivered.
The Total View suggests that we should seek to maximise total wellbeing, including by creating new lives. There are problems with the Total View that have concerning implications in practice.
William MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. In Doing Good Better, he explains the reasoning behind a lot of EA ideas. The EA movement has changed a bit since 2015, when MacAskill wrote the book. But the core ideas in Doing Good Better are still very solid and worth understanding.
We can’t give a fuck about everything, so we have to choose our fucks carefully. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck suggests how we might make those choices.
Many people compare Sapiens to Guns Germs and Steel. In my opinion, GGS overall is a better book than Sapiens. But both are worth reading.
The Courage to be Disliked features a series of conversations between a youth and a philosopher. The philosopher has three central claims, based on the philosophy of Austrian psychiatrist, Alfred Adler: the world is simple, people can change, and everyone can be happy.